Grit Lab Report

Hi Lilah,

Welcome to your personalized Grit Lab Report!

We will go week by week, reviewing everything you have told us through Poll Everywhere.

We hope this will help you reflect on what you have learned and experienced during Grit Lab.

Important note!

Sometimes, you may not have been able to respond to all polls.

If the data for one of the polls is missing, the automatic report will display NA, or ““.

Okay, let’s get started!

The first half of Grit Lab delves deep intp the passion facet of Grit.

We like to call it Choose Easy, because we think gritty people pursue what they enjoy.

Putting it graphically, gritty people tend to pursue the intersection of these four circles.

The first time we met, you told us where you were on the grit rubric.

Regarding passion you picked Stage 3: I’m actively figuring out what my interests are by trying one or more of them out in some way .

Regarding perseverance you picked .

As you know, grit grows, so don’t worry if you are not yet where you’d like to be in your grit journey.

Hopefully, this class will help you become grittier each day.

In week 2, we looked at your interests.

Interest is an emotion, and it is the opposite of boredom.

Your interests are the activities or subjects that spontaneously grab your attention.

Trying things out and seeing how you feel is the best way to refine your interests.

In week 3, we studied values, your beliefs about what is important.

You said your top three values were benevolence, universalism, and self-direction.

You wrote a “This I Believe” essay, and here’s where you located it on Schwartz’s value taxonomy.

When we talked about strengths in week 4, you said your personality strength was agreeableness.

You said your top three talents were social, verbal, and musical.

We then talked about goal hierarchies.

You said you were not sure yet about your top-level goal.

We discussed self-concordance, or how much a goal aligns to your deeply held values and beliefs.

A goal you said you will be pursuing for the next six months is to get a job .

Here is how self-concordant that goal was:

Don’t worry if your self-concordance for that particular goal is low.

It might mean that you need to reframe that goal in a way that makes it more relevant to your deep self, or change it!

Remember that self-concordance is goal specific, so other goals might be more self-concordant.

We then transitioned to the second part of Grit Lab:

Work Smart

In week 6, we looked at goal setting and planning.

You WOOPed!

For your Wish, what you wanted to accomplish, you said Get my flu shot .

For your Outcome, what would happen if your wish came true, you said Feeling healthy .

For you Obstacle, what it is within you that stands in your way, you said Finding free time .

For your Plan, you created this when-then plan to achieve your goal: When I go to the gym on Thursday, I will get my flu shot .

Whether you changed your WOOP or stuck to that one, here’s where it landed between being a total fail, and going exactly according to plan.

And here’s how much you learned

These goals are hard, and despite our best efforts, our plans can fail.

The important thing is that you learn something along the way!

In week 7, we talked about deliberate practice.

You shared you’ve done daily practice in Piano .

We learned that deliberate practice requires a challenging, hyperspecific goal, maximum concentration, instant feedback, and is often done alone.

In week 8, we discussed feedback.

Even though feedback can be hard to take, it is often the key to improve. So if you want to improve, seek it actively!

You said you felt defensive when receiving critical feedback, and defensive when receiving positive feedback.

We then turned to learning about stress.

In week 9, you reported feeling a moderate amount of stress in your life right now, the primary source of it being war .

We also talked about adversity and failure.

Although related, adversity and failure are different:

Adversity happens to us, whereas failure is something for which we are generally more responsible.

However, how we interpret stress and failure matters…

Interestingly, research has found that people who believe that stress can facilitate learning and growth experience enhanced performance, well-being, and health.

And failure—not achieving a particular goal—can be interpreted as “I’m learning!” and lead you to look for the lesson in that experience.

We closed the Work Smart section of the class by talking about habits.

Throughout the semester, you practice habit building using your Build-A-Habit Guide book.

You describe the habit you chose as Health .

Whether you were successful in habit building or not, this is how much you learned.

Finally, what good is grit if we do not dream for others?

So, we transitioned to Paying it Forward.

In week 10, we looked at mentors: role models that take an active role in your growth.

Hopefully, your mentor was authoritative, being both supportive and demanding.

Here’s how you described them:

You also wrote a gratitude letter to Parent .

In one word, you said it made you feel Proud .

One way of paying it forward is having a prosocial, beyond-the-self purpose. Here’s how you responded to items assessing that.

… and so quickly we arrived at the end of the semester.

Here’s how your mood varied over these weeks.

Do you notice any patterns? Is there anything that correlates with your mood?

Here you can scroll through all the quotes you wrote to summarize each class.

Talent x effort = skill
Interest is an emotion!!!
Talents are what innately come easily to you.
Goal = a desired future state
WOOP 'attaches you to the sky' but grounds you by focusing on obstacles as well.
Experts are made not born
Advice is good for you and me
Stress can be beneficial !
Habits happen when you get rid of the thought box!
Mentors are great for motivation and information
There is a giver taker and matcher in all of us!

In the final class, we looked back to everything we’ve learned together and to how our passion and perseverance evolved during this class.

Here are the comments from your Grit Lab Teammates:

Sulaiman Yamin
Over the course of the past semester, I’ve grown to deeply admire Lilah’s ability to cogently express her opinions and how open she has been with the group. I feel as though I’ve learned a lot about the sort of household she was raised in as well as the current dynamics she has with friends and family (especially her roommates and her brother Caleb!). This vulnerability has in turn made me and our other group members much more comfortable sharing details about our lives, which furthers productive conversation and facilitates learning. Lilah is a great synthesizer of knowledge, and her background studying psychology has been super helpful for me in learning some of the more nuanced parts of the course. I greatly appreciate the energy and joy she brings to our group, and her smile has the capacity to light up any conversation. Lilah's Discovery project on charcoal painting was a fascinating deep dive into the world of Charcoal drawing, showcasing the reignition of a passion that stemmed from an art class she took at Penn. Her presentation was not only informative, detailing the array of materials required for charcoal painting, but also reflective of her personal journey in embracing this medium. What stood out most was her emphasis on the collaborative learning experience with her roommate, who played a pivotal role as her 'Discovery Project BFF.' This partnership, along with her dedication to learning from other seasoned artists and her own experimental approaches, painted a vivid picture of her growth and enthusiasm in the realm of charcoal art. Lilah's project was a testament to the power of hands-on learning and the value of community in the pursuit of art as a fun hobby, rather than the desire to become a professional.
Stefani Turcios-Moya
Lilah has been a great teammate this semester and it was a pleasure getting to know her. I really valued having someone that was easygoing and the energy she brought everyday to class was very uplifting. Her willingness to share her personal stories to the rest of us made it easier for me to open up about my life. I found many similarities between both of us and it was nice talking to her and reflecting during our one on ones in class. We both want to pursue the field of psychology even though its in different ways. I liked being able to share what it was like being the 'therapist friend' within our own friends group and it was great discussing how that has shaped us and influenced our future's. I am thankful to have had her as a teammate this semester and wish her nothing but the best moving forward! Lilah's discovery project was very interesting. Seeing her talk about charcoal drawing all the class concepts and her reflections on it made sense. She chose to do her discovery project that helped her relax and lean into her artistic side more and getting to know her throughout the semester I know she has expressed this idea also through meditation. I learned that there is more than meets the eye with this type of art. I did not except it to make many materials to create a drawing.

We hope you have emerged from Grit Lab a little grittier than you started.

Do you want to see how your grit rubric changed?

Drumroll please…

Don’t worry if the rubric doesn’t yet reflect growth. It is only a coarse measure that cannot replace your own self-reflection.

In any case, grit is not built in a day…

…remember that progress is never smooth…

…so stay passionate and persevering in the lifelong quest of choosing easy, working smart, and paying it forward.

With grit and gratitude,

Angela and the Grit Lab team.